Spend Matters names the Future 5 start-up lists for 2023

10/19/2023 By Spend Matters Team

Modules

After 12 months of intense debate, Spend Matters has just released the 2023 ‘50 Procurement Providers to Know’ and ‘50 Procurement Providers to Watch’ lists. At the same time, during the SIG Global Executive Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, Spend Matters also announced, for the fifth consecutive year, the Future 5.

Introducing The Future 5 of 2023

Throughout the year, our analysts scour the market to find and scrutinize procurement tech newcomers. This list is composed of the most impressive procurement technology start-ups that meet our criteria:

They must:

Be less than 5 years old.
Have 5+ customers.
Have an innovative, interesting application of technology.
Maintain clear momentum and sustainability.
Have less than $10 million in revenue.

We are pleased to announce that the recognized Future 5 providers are:

akirolabs — Founded by procurement veterans, akirolabs is a Berlin-based digital solution that helps transform procurement from a tactical function to a value orchestrator. By leveraging AI and a collaborative approach it supports the development of procurement strategies and enables procurement teams to build and execute them effectively. The platform provides a framework called “analyze, strategize, realize” that allows customers to analyze internal requirements and external opportunities, strategize potential courses of action and realize the chosen strategy.
Calculum — Calculum is a cloud-based analytics solution that specializes in optimizing payment terms. It currently supports buyers (suppliers are on the roadmap) and can be integrated into procurement and accounts payable IT solutions. Its goal is to make a supply chain more competitive by optimizing payment terms between buyer organizations and their suppliers (which it does primarily through AI).
dSilo — dSilo is an AI-focused contract and invoicing analytics solution that helps companies derive value from existing data through pre-trained AI models. Its founders have extensive supply chain and enterprise technology experience. They identified a gap in the solution market: valuable information exists within unstructured procurement data, but it is rarely ever extracted and made useful.
Mithra.Ai — Mithra is an AI-based spend analytics solution that develops fit-for-purpose data models for each of its clients and with an emphasis on user-friendliness. Its founders wanted to reduce the cognitive load for procurement teams and help them quickly identify and pursue more hidden opportunities by combining a human-led AI algorithm with dynamic taxonomy classification and an automatic synergy finder (to compare datasets).
ORO Labs — ORO Labs is an orchestration platform that focuses on bridging siloed processes to improve the experience stakeholders have when working with procurement. It helps procurement to channel and properly handle even more requests, keeping suppliers at the core of its solutions.

Congratulations to the five start-ups, and look out for a special series of features that examines the origins and roadmap of each provider, which starts this week with dSilo. Read our analysts’ analysis and reasoning here and our special feature here.

Nikhil Gaur, research analyst and 50/50, Future 5 project lead at Spend Matters said:

“As procurement departments are looking to technology for increased efficiency as well as cost savings, providers are using new means to appeal to the market. To help make sense of these developments and the long-term market outlook beyond the hype, we’re pleased to present Spend Matters’ tenth annual ‘50 Providers to Know,’ ‘50 Providers to Watch’ and ‘Future 5’ listees, sourced and calculated by the entire Spend Matters analyst team to represent the best of the technology providers that serve procurement, finance and supply chain organizations … The market can be confident that the providers chosen for these lists are truly the most impressive in the industry.”